A wireless local area network (WLAN) often includes an access point (AP) and one or more WLAN stations (STAs). As the AP and STAs share a common wireless medium, transmissions and collisions on the medium are common. The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) has defined a standard for WLAN medium access control (MAC) and physical (PHY) layers. A recent version of this standard is “Part 11: Wireless LAN Medium Access Control (MAC) and Physical Layer (PHY) Specifications,” IEEE Std. 802.11™-2012, Mar. 29, 2012, (2,793 pages) (hereinafter “IEEE 802.11”). A STA is an addressable unit in the IEEE 802.11 standard. Other wireless local area network standardization schemes and activities exist. The Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) has created a concept known as License Assisted Access (LAA) to unlicensed spectrum.
An AP is a physical or a virtual device that provides access, via a wireless medium (WM), for associated STAs to another network, such as the Internet. Devices in a WLAN communicate with each via the shared WM. STAs send, receive and/or interfere with each other on the shared WM. A STA is in-range of another STA when it can detect a transmission from the other STA directly.